John Mueller from Google recently discussed an issue that some site owners may encounter when expired product pages are flagged as soft 404s. This was addressed during a recent Google Webmaster Central hangout in response to a question posed by a participant:
“Google is reporting our expired product pages as soft 404. These URLs redirect to a relevant, alternate product with a message saying the product they wanted is unavailable.”
The standard practice when content becomes unavailable is to redirect it to a similar page. This raises the question of why Google is identifying these expired pages as soft 404s.
Mueller suggests that the issue might be linked to the message on the landing page to which users are redirected. When Googlebot crawls the page and encounters a “no longer available” message, it may interpret this as pertaining to the page itself.
Mueller acknowledges that this issue cannot be entirely avoided. If an old product is being replaced by a new one, he recommends redirecting the page without the “no longer available” message. However, if the product is discontinued entirely, treating it as a soft 404 might be the best approach.
For a detailed explanation, listen to the full question and answer starting at the 11:23 mark.
Mueller elaborates:
“I suspect what is happening here is that our algorithms are looking at these pages and they’re seeing maybe there’s a banner on the page saying ‘this product is no longer available.’ And [our algorithms] assume that applies to the page the user ended up on. So that’s sometimes not really avoidable. If you’re really replacing one product with another it might make sense to just redirect. If one product is gone completely and is no longer available then you could put it in this soft 404 state where you say this product is no longer available.”